


Enter Sandman

by Safiyabat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Community: evilsam_spn, Evil Sam Winchester, Gen, International Fanworks Day 2015, Protective Sam Winchester, Psychic Sam, Temporary Character Death - Winchesters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-12 09:52:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3352235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Safiyabat/pseuds/Safiyabat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Walt's been fighting the good fight ever since he killed the evil son-of-a-whatever that started the Apocalypse. Shame about his brother, though - but sometimes there's collateral damage in a war. Then came the case with the dreams...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enter Sandman

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my wonderful beta, elwarre!

Walt had been hunting since he’d been sixteen. There’d been a story behind it, of course. His house had been hit up by a poltergeist, nasty sucker that left some ugly scratches on all the children in that house, broke every window in the place (putting a scar right across Walt’s chest that was still there to this day, thank you very much) and messed with the wiring until Aunt Maisie died from smoke inhalation.

That had been what brought John Winchester around, tall as the Devil and with hair as dark as night. He’d come in and saved Walt and his cousin Roy, even if he couldn’t save Roy’s mama. He got them to safety and he took a few weeks to give them some tips, tell them what was out there and give them some quick lessons on what was really happening in the world. Then he aimed them at a guy by the name of Caleb for more info, said he had a couple of kids he had to get back to and took off.

For Walt, there were two kinds of people in the world. There were people who had a loss and mourned, who wrung their hands and dried their tears and said, “Oh, that was the Lord’s will” and suffered through it. And there were people who got up off their asses and did something about it. Walt was one of the latter. He grabbed Roy and hit the road, moving on and taking up the hunt.

He did meet up with John Winchester again, more than a few times. The older hunter was more than happy to see the boys following in his footsteps. “We need all the fighters we can get in this war.”

Both Roy and Walt liked thinking of themselves that way – soldiers in a war against evil. They had a concrete enemy that way, something definable and undeniably worthy of fighting. It made everything they dealt with worth it. It gave them a concrete mission, something they were aiming for instead of just kind of wandering aimlessly around the country and hoping to cross paths with a werewolf.

And they were lucky to be in John’s good graces. They weren’t in his inner circle – not like Jim Murphy up in Minnesota, or Caleb. They weren’t his shining son Dean, who greeted them with tight smiles that never quite reached his eyes. Probably jealous, Walt surmised. John was more than happy to call them for backup when he had a case he needed to chase that he couldn’t quite define, when he couldn’t exactly answer all the questions for his partner yet. Probably couldn’t do that for his kid. Both Walt and his cousin considered themselves lucky, chosen. Special.

John didn’t tell them a lot, because there wasn’t a whole lot to tell. But he did tell them that there was a storm coming – something big. And didn’t he just get proven right when that Devil’s Gate opened up? Some hunters believed that John’s own sons had opened it. Others thought it had just been John’s useless, absconding son Sam, the one that neither John nor Dean spoke about when Walt or Roy met them. Others, like Bobby Singer and Ellen Harvelle (who said they were there), said that the Winchester boys had tried to close the Gate, gotten there after the fact. At the time, Walt had believed them.

It didn’t matter at first – it was more important to keep ahead of the demons that now filled the world. The thing was, rumors started to reach the cousins. He heard from Gordon Walker, from Kubrick, from guys in that circle. Sam had powers, given to him by a demon. Sam had always been an oddity among hunters, an outcast even among his family, but now he was actively consorting with the other side.

Then the Apocalypse came. And Sam Winchester started it all. He let Lucifer out of his Cage and then thought he could just go slinking back to whatever rock his part-demon self had crawled out from under.

Well, John Winchester had taught Walt and Roy better than that, hadn’t he? The cousins devoted themselves to hunting the hellspawn down, finally tracking him to the very seediest of seedy motels somewhere in the Midwest. Then Walt himself filled his chest full of lead. Coward hadn’t even fought it. He’d tried to “explain,” but what explanation could there possibly be? He’d started Armageddon.

He felt kind of bad about killing Dean. He’d liked the kid, even if the kid had always been kind of jealous of him. But Dean had to go, because the kid never could let Sam go, and that was it.

Of course, the Apocalypse never did happen, or never finished anyway. Things calmed down. They changed a bit – creatures started acting differently, off-cycle, but what did anyone expect? The Apocalypse probably jarred things loose. There were a few alleged Winchester sightings, but Walt knew that they were shifters. The Winchesters were dead and that was all there was to it. He and Roy went back to killing ghosts and vampires and ghouls, and good riddance too.

The angels fell. That was awkward. Neither of them had any idea how to handle an angel, but they kept their heads down and tried to stick with what they knew.

A low-level buzz came to their ears about Dean Winchester coming back as a demon, and that – well, that was scary as Hell, pun absolutely intended. “Dean was a good man,” Roy objected. “I mean sure Sam went to Hell, it was the right place for him. Where he belonged. But Dean? He was going to the other place, man.”

Walt snorted. “You really think he’d have let him and Sam get separated?”

Roy wasn’t going to contest that one. Everyone knew the truth about those two.

The rumors died down after a little while – it wasn’t like demons usually remembered who they’d been in life anyway.

Then people started dying. Walt and Roy picked up the case after getting a call from Tracy Bell, because even though she was smart as anything it was well outside of her area of expertise and she wanted someone with more experience to take a look at it.

Basically the case, as near as she could describe it, was that people were lapsing into comas. The cause of death turned out to be extreme physical stress – the heart and lungs responded as though they had been though a major physical event, even though it had literally done nothing but lie on its back. The list of victims Tracy found seemed kind of strange: a couple of people in St. Louis who turned out to be witches, a doctor in New Jersey, another doctor in Indiana (apparently whatever this was had a thing about doctors), a pro dom in Iowa who went by the name of The Chief… “This doesn’t make any sense at all,” Walt commented to Roy. “There’s no connection between any of them.”

Roy pursed his skinny lips. “The witches both mentioned that they heard the same song playing in their nightmare.” He shrugged. “Something by Metallica. I guess that’s a start.”

That night Roy began to dream. He screamed out in his terror, so loud that the manager of the motel came around. Walt didn’t care; if Walt couldn’t wake Roy out of the nightmare the manager was welcome to try. Neither could; Roy had to wake himself.

When he woke, he described dreams of war – a great war, between beings too monstrous to even describe. He broke out in a sweat as he spoke, talking about faces twisted beyond recognition and the stench of sulfur. He was talking about descriptions of Hell, Walt recognized. Roy was describing Hell. The manager was shaking when he left, recommending both sleeping pills and serious mental help.

The next night Roy dreamed of fire, just unending fire.

He didn’t scream on the third night. He didn’t wake up either, but lapsed into the final coma. Walt brought him to the hospital, but he knew there was almost nothing he could do.

In desperation, he called Garth Fitzgerald. The guy had tried to set himself up as Bobby Singer’s heir at some point, but had fallen off the radar for a while. He’d call you back sometimes, if he got the message and if he could help you. He called back this time. “Huh,” he said. “Coma sounds like dream root, but I don’t know anyone who’s seen a case like this since the Winchesters and Bobby Singer took down an addict who was going after people who were trying to cut off his supply way back in 2007. They’re the ones you should be talking to, buddy.”

Winchesters. “The Winchesters are dead, Garth. I killed them myself back in… oh, maybe ’09, maybe 2010?”

Garth guffawed. “Aw, Walt, you’ve been around long enough to know the Winchesters never stay dead for more’n a few hours. C’mon, man. Dean’s pizza buddies with Death Himself! Seriously, though, you should give Sam a call. He ain’t gonna care that you killed him. He’s just going to want to help.”

Walt couldn’t move. “I didn’t just kill him, Garth.”

The Southerner winced. “Oooh. You killed Dean. Well, I’ll give him a call, then. Won’t mention your name. I got your back, buddy. If there’s one thing he can hold a grudge about, it’s people who hurt his brother.”

Walt didn’t bother to say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. He hung up the phone and he ran.

He felt bad about leaving Roy, but he couldn’t help Roy if he was dead. If he could hunt down Sam Winchester (again), he could maybe rescue Roy. Of course he had absolutely no idea where to start. The kid was usually somewhere near his brother, right?

He drove until he got low on gas, at which point he pulled into the seediest motel he could find. He didn’t need to be picky, and it wasn’t his usual style so Winchester wouldn’t be looking here. Then he got his laptop and started searching. He could probably manage to find the Impala online somehow; he’d done it before, right? It would take a while but it wasn’t like he was going to go to sleep.

At least he didn’t think he was going to go to sleep. He didn’t plan to go to sleep. By about four in the morning he found his eyelids getting heavy; he couldn’t hold them open anymore. The words were swimming on the screen; he needed a rest. He couldn’t save Roy if he wrapped himself around a tree.

No sooner did he close his eyes than the sounds of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” reverberated around his head. He startled. He hadn’t meant to let himself sleep long enough to dream, but here he was. The room was large, empty and damp. It looked a lot like an airplane hangar, the kind you saw in old World War 2 flicks. He had a chair to sit on – small favors, he guessed – but he’d been secured to it and couldn’t get out no matter how hard he struggled. “Winchester!” he yelled. “Winchester! Come out and face me like a man, you bastard!”

Footsteps echoed on the concrete floor. They shouldn’t have been able to echo, it was concrete and that stupid Metallica song was blaring away at them like some kind of demented soundtrack, but those boots echoed nevertheless. He guessed that physics weren’t a thing in dreams.

After a moment, his quarry appeared, just as requested. Sam Winchester didn’t look at all like he had the last time Walt had seen him. He looked older, for one thing – a lot older than the few years that had passed, never mind that his face wasn’t much more lined. His face was thinner. His body was leaner, even though he’d been all muscle before. Before, he’d been all earnestness and resignation. Now he was just… cold, with a funny little smile playing around the corner of his mouth. “Walt,” he greeted in a quiet voice. “How are you?”

“You’re the one killing all those people!”

He shrugged. “Had it coming.”

“They’re human! Roy and me are hunters!”

He made a face, like he’d bitten into something he didn’t like. “Roy and I are hunters,” he corrected. “Here’s the thing, Walt. It doesn’t matter that you’re hunters. You think hunters ever cared that they were killing humans before?”

“You were never human!” he snarled.

Sam smirked, and his eyes flashed gold. “Now that – that you got right. Your grammar’s atrocious, but you got that right.” A chair appeared beside him and the giant straddled it, leaning forward with a weird kind of casual intensity. “You’ve probably got some questions.”

Walt scowled. “Why are you doing this, you satanic bastard?”

Sam glared. “Not satanic.” He sighed. “But I guess there’s not exactly a lot of harm in you knowing. You might have heard about Dean’s latest brush with Hell.”

Walt couldn’t help but nod. “Wasn’t true, though.”

Sam gave a bitter little laugh. There wasn’t a lot of humor to it. “Oh it was true, Walt. You don’t really need to know the mechanics behind it. I managed to cure him, but it took some… um… drastic measures to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. I’m not going to let anything happen to my brother again, Walt.”

“So all of this is some weird kind of demonic ritual?”

Sam blinked, and his eyes went back to their normal – well, not normal, but usual kaleidoscope color. “What? How do you get from killing people through dream root to –” He shook his head, like he was trying to shake something loose. “Jeez, I knew you were the smart one, but really. No. I’ve taken care of it. But I had to find the way to cure him of the Mark, and to do that I had to hack into a very powerful witch’s brain. I’d used dream root before.”

“Something you did with Bobby Singer, right?”

“Yeah. If you use it enough times, do it right you can get into the dream, you can make the victim’s dream do anything you want.” He grinned, nasty and vicious.

“And you… you’d done it a lot?”

“Nah. Once, before Rowena. Against the guy we took out. Jeremy was smart. He wasn’t a part-demon psychic. Anyway, dealing with Rowena required me to open myself up to some, uh, newer ways of thinking. And you know, I’ve been disappointing Dean for an awfully long time. Letting him down. Letting other people get away with hurting him.”

“Those witches…”

“Working with a witch we took out – one who gave him flashbacks to Hell,” Sam confirmed easily. “I couldn’t just let someone do that to Dean, Walt.” For a moment, the hunter caught a glimpse of that old earnestness in this monster before him.

“The doctors?”

“One was dating his ex. Other one tried to get him to donate Bobby Singer’s organs before he died.”

“The dom?”

“It was close, alright? He didn’t say anything, but he was… uncomfortable. I can’t let that stand.” His jaw tightened. “I’ve got to protect him, Walt. I need to keep him safe.” He rose, all affability now, and patted Walt on the shoulder. “Anyway. Good chat. Sorry about this, but it’s quicker than letting you starve to death in your own filth. Trust me on this one – it’ll hurt, but it’s better this way.”

In the distance, he heard something roar. “What… wait. This – this isn’t my dream.” He panted as he tried to struggle out of his bonds and force himself back into wakefulness, which only seemed to amuse the Winchester. “I don’t dream about you. Or this place. Why am I dreaming about this? And Roy’s dream – why that… that Hell war? That’s not how dream root’s supposed to work; Singer told me that much.”

“Oh. Right. Well, here’s the thing, Walt. All of you? You’re… you know. You’re human. You’ve lived some exciting lives, don’t get me wrong. I mean – Rowena? She’s almost four hundred years old and a witch to boot! But all of you – every last one of you – has lived your entire life on earth.” He shrugged. “I spent five thousand years locked up in a cage with two very angry archangels. Lucifer, at least, was pretty creative.” He leaned in. “My dreams are a lot more interesting. More efficient, when it comes to execution.”

Walt thought he might be sick. The only thing that kept him from just passing out was the need to escape. Walt was a survivor, after all. It was how he’d survived this long. “Why the song?” Anything to buy time, anything so that someone could rescue him. Dean, maybe. Garth, Tracy. Someone.

Sam chuckled softly. “Yeah. Dean loves Metallica, but this is my favorite song they ever did. The Yankees used to play it when their closer came in at the end of a game.”

Walt’s jaw dropped. He said the first words that came to his mind. “Your dad hated the Yankees.”

Sam’s answering grin. “You’re right. He did. Always had a bit of an eye for Andy Pettitte, myself.” He walked away, whistling along with the song.

Walt screamed as the dragon’s shadow loomed larger on the wall.


End file.
